If you received an email announcing my 50th blog article, you may want to skip this and instead read these most recent articles: Vision: every-person-a-business-person, Vision: did it start a series of innovations?, and The Garage-Sale principle and process-centricity. Reason: I'm reproducing here that email announcement (with minor edits) . . .
The article 3 strokes of genius, 30 years of unbroken profitability is my 50th. I'd like you to join me in celebrating the milestone (knowing well that 50 is not a big number by Blogging standards). But here's where I got the inspiration from . . .
I did something similar nearly 10 years back. When my Center of Excellence (COE) completed its 50th project, I sent out an email to all folks in the company celebrating the accomplishment. A few folks congratulated me and my team members, but many thought it was self-promotion and some even gently suggested I stop doing it.
I continued to do it. I sent out an announcement when we completed 100 projects, and another when we completed 150 projects, and so on. In fact, the scale of celebration only increased everytime. We increasingly involved other teams and experts in the celebration. Awareness of my COE's performance improved. Software teams engaged my COE more frequently (and therefore improved the value customers received). And my team members felt like they were getting an indirect "pat on the back" for their outstanding contribution.
What was initially perceived as self-promotion was "copied" by nearly all other groups in the organization. When we planned my COE's 300th project announcement we had some difficulty -- we had to carefully time the release of the email just to avoid being lost in the clutter!
Strikingly, even the company's internal slogan became "Celebrating Work."
Now, should you or should you not celebrate?